There has been a massive ongoing discussion on LJ’s wow_ladies, which can basically summed up as follows:

Let’s say you’re randoming a heroic as a tank or healer, and you ended up in a group with a couple of DPSers who are not pulling their weight, but the instance is going smoothly. Do you comment on it, or do you let it pass because it’s all good anyway?

I’ll sum up my stance with an anecdote from the other day.

Lumi ended up in a heroic Strat group through the random dungeon option. I was tanking. Lumi was fairly well geared at that point, rocking an unbuffed 38ish thousand HP, and other appropriate stats. The healer was one of the top guilds on Grim Batol, with the best raid gear one could get. It looks all fine to me, we go ahead and begin.

Meathook seems to take his sweet time dying, and I take a look at Skada. I’ve done an average of 1300 DPS and I’m right there on top of damage done. Um, really now?

After Meathook died, I inspected my fellow group mates. All of them were in a hodgepodge of greens and blues, with the occasional ilvl200 epic thrown in. This much is fine. What wasn’t fine was the all the empty sockets glaring at me from their gear, as well as the lack of enchants even on the higher quality pieces. Really, how do you win an epic helm that is leaps and bounds better than any of your other pieces, and then think to yourself  “Nvm, don’t need to socket or enchant that”? How can anyone not afford all of three gold needed to buy a green quality gem from the AH?

I asked my group members to please up their DPS as they were all really low (DK, arms warrior, and hunter, for the record). The responses ranged from “We haven’t even wiped, what’s your problem?” “I’m a new 80, lol” to “I’m an alt”.

Does one need to wipe in an instance to notice that they have to get better? Why is it that most people don’t bother to go above that minimum “do this, else we’ll wipe” threshold, and think that this is fair to everyone else in the group? Since when is “I’m a new 80″ or “I’m an alt” an excuse for subpar performance in a heroic?

To me, all of those responses indicated a gratuitous lack of respect. As one of my friends put it, manners don’t seem to be included in the new patches. You are disrespecting your group members when you’re in a heroic with unenchanted, ungemmed gear, with full knowledge that you don’t belong there, not trying to squeeze out the best DPS you have. You are telling strangers “I know I’m not good enough, so please carry me through this, okay?” in an extremely cheeky way.

I have a friend. She dinged 80 a couple of days ago, a moonkin who had to reroll EU from US, leaving two years of investment in her character. Even while she was leveling, she was planning out her gear at 80, ranking pieces, eyeballing things she could cheaply buy from the AH. She had a set of gemmed, enchanted gear waiting for her as soon as she dinged 80, a mix of blues and cheap 200-219 epics. The results? ~1800 DPS sustained on a target dummy the day she dinged. She had 1600ish spellpower at this point and was fully hitcapped.

This, my friends, is how you respect others.

The four of us, our little friends group, take her along to heroic runs now. Most of the time she’s dead last on the meters. Does it bother any of us? Hell no. We all outgear her by miles, but even more important than that, she has already done the best she can to improve her gear, tweak her rotation, and to get herself to an acceptable level for heroics. The rest can come with time. She has shown respect for herself and for everyone else she’s going to be grouped with, and that goes much, much further than any epic loot can ever take her.

In the same vein, if everyone in my Strat group had bothered to enchant and gem the shinies they had? Even if they did less damage than Lumi afterwards? I wouldn’t care. Not at all. They’ve already shown some respect, so I’d gladly “carry” those people. We were all new to 80 once. No one is expected to do 3k+ DPS sustained the day they hit 80.

If you’re ever a fresh 80 on any character out to do heroics, ask yourself this question: “If everyone’s gear, performance and knowledge were equal to my own, would we able to get through this instance smoothly?” The answer you want to this question is a resounding yes. No ifs, no buts, no maybes. If the answer is anything but yes, go back and try again until it is.

This whole debacle does, though, get the goat of all the people who legitimately earned their gear when people don’t bother, which is part of where the whole casual/elitist debate stems from. Here’s news, guys – when you don’t bother making some effort towards pulling your weight before grouping with other people? That’s not being casual.

Casual is not an excuse for being bad. Casual is when you have limited time to devote to the game, and I’m pretty sure you can still conjure up some respect for others with that limited time. You’re oh so busy with whatever things you do in real life, and can’t be bothered to read a wiki page or one forum thread before you engage in group play? Fine. Then you don’t really belong in group play, so don’t be surprised or hurt when you get removed. You can take a few minutes to read up on your class and the instances, spec properly, gem properly, enchant properly. There are a great many “casual” people out there who do that, moonkin!friend being just one of them.

When you’re playing in a group, in a MMO no less, you make an implied promise to others that you’ll perform your assigned role to the best of your ability. You end up taking on responsibilities, and not fulfilling those responsibilities shows a great lack of respect towards the people you play with – and this is what gets me and a lot of the people who kicked you out of their party.

Moonky and I were just chilling in some  late night AVs and discussing Cataclysm with regard to the casual/hardcore debate in /g. The discussion led itself to a few interesting points.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that as far as the casual debate was concerned, Blizzard had it right in TBC and Wrath was a step in the wrong direction.

To start this, of course we gotta define casual.

There is this common opinion that casual means someone who doesn’t raid, and hardcore is someone who raids. This seems to follow from the train of thought that says: “If you can afford to spend long blocks of time in the game, you naturally start raiding.”

Except, this is not true – there are a lot of people who devote hours to the game without doing any progression raiding. And I simply cannot say that you are playing a game casually if you log on every day for a couple of hours.

The player I could call casual would be someone who logged on for a few hours every week to do whatever they like. They can’t or aren’t willing to spend more than an hour or so in the game at a time. They aren’t willing to spend time outside of the game reading about how to play the game. They took four or five months just getting to the level cap. They purchased the expansion a month after it hit. They just want to log in, have some fun doing whatever they like, log out.

Due to time constraints, the casual player can’t afford to, or just doesn’t like to, engage in extended group play. Raids are definitely out from their POV. 5-mans are occasional. That leaves them with questing or PVP for character progression. And as we all know, there is a very firm ceiling as far as quested gear is concerned.

This leaves a single option for the truly casual player to progress their character: PVP.

In TBC, this was fine and dandy – PVP gear was readily available. Anyone could put in a few hours of work here and there, and still end up with something to show for it. This is why Blizzard got it right for the “casuals” in TBC. They could queue for a battleground, join up, participate, obtain some good gear without needing to rely on other people, or having to devote large chunks of time at once. Every season, the gear was upped in quality, so there was still something new to strive for, something else that would make you remain competitve.

This changed in Wrath.

Wrath caters more to the “hardcore casual”. The people who log in every day. The people who can afford to spend big blocks of time ingame, but somehow don’t want to or cannot be part of an organized PVE effort. What Wrath did was make raiding easier, so that people did not need to be part of anything organized – it didn’t solve the time problem.

However, it did take away the casual’s real route to gear progression. All the PVP gear is either rated, has a prohibitively high cost for its quality, or requires you to be online at a certain time in a certain place much like raiding. The PVP gear obtained can, with a few exceptions, no longer be used in competitive PvE because of the stat changes and the heavy resilience weighting.

Most importantly, the single greatest slot, weapons, are currently rated, forcing people to participate in the arena metagame and be good at it. Again, your casual doesn’t have the time or the inclination to do that.

If Blizzard really wanted to keep the real casuals playing, Wrath was the wrong direction for that. The casual/hardcore debate in Wrath is meaningless from that point of view, because there is very little in this expansion that actually caters to the casuals. It’s all aimed at the hardcore casual, and it’s succeeding.

Going with that train of thought, was there any need for the stat-dumbing-down that was announced in Blizzcon? The hardcore casual is already willing to spend time outside of the game to improve themselves. I doubt that the change will make a lot of difference for the true casual, who doesn’t have access to that level of play to begin with – the level where decisions such as these would matter.

The change(s) won’t motivate the casuals to take part in raiding, because they lack the one thing Blizzard can’t give them, and that’s time. Sure, they can do a few instances a week, and get a piece of T8,5… in six weeks? Eight? Assuming they persist, which a lot of people won’t, because the length of time needed for the gear is discouraging, especially for a casual who had been playing during TBC.

Add to this the fact that the (very player-created) entry threshold is high for most content, both PVE and PVP. Technically, you might be able to clear every heroic in your fresh level 80 quest greens. In reality, unless you are above the actual entry threshold by a healthy margin, you’ll be refused entry by your PUG. PVP is worse – watch yourself get steamrolled for hours while you collect the some 60,000 honor needed for a single piece of gear.

The casual, in theory, can slowly work towards their goals. However, to gain entry into heroics, they must at least turn to craftables. Gathering the materials or gold takes time. After spending a few weeks gathering those, then you’ll be allowed to go into heroics, and maybe get badges for yet another item, that will take yet longer. The prospect of spending so much IRL time leaves people with two choices: Spend more time ingame, or just stop playing altogether because the motivation is lost. For most casuals who are unable or unwilling to dedicate more to the game, the choice is simple.

To actually cater to the casual – improve the quality of PVP, because that is the only group activity in the game where the player needs to pass no player-created threshold to play within a group, and does not require devoting large blocks of time at once. Bring back the TBC PVP system. Remove rating requirements from all arena gear (”Matches that take five minutes each, ten of them a week, progress towards a piece of high quality gear? Sign me up!”). In short, make PVP a truly viable avenue for the casual to pursue for gear progression.